How Marketing Automation Can Solve Common Business Challenges

Thanks to modern software, combined with an increasingly digital customer base, automating your marketing has never been easier. The online business experience makes gathering and managing data – both customers’ and your own – much simpler, which in turn makes it easier for marketing software to help you automate tasks that were previously done manually.

Marketing automation is becoming the norm, so much so, that it’s a must for keeping up with your competition. To get the best use out of it, though, you’ll need to know what you’re using it for, and which problems it can solve:

Determining Marketing Spend

Automated marketing tools help you figure out:

Total monetary spend

Time investment

Where to invest

Where you can reduce loss

Figuring out how much of your budget should be spent on marketing is always difficult. You’ll also need to calculate what percentage of that budget goes towards various marketing efforts, and even subdivide those budgets further. It takes a lot of trial and error to get everything exactly as you want it, and even then it can all change suddenly based on the economy, the season, the political climate or just a change in trends.

Marketing automation helps you keep on top of it all by letting you adjust your budget on the fly so that you only spend what’s necessary to see a good return on investment. With automated marketing tools, such as auto-bidding in Google AdWords, you only spend what you need to get a lead, making it easier to avoid overspending.

Marketing automation and reporting also help you figure out your best investments. With automated tools, you have a more efficient spend, so that your budget goes further and increases your returns.

Calculating Return on Investment

Automated marketing tools help with:

Long-term reporting

Predictive analytics

ROI Calculation

Highlighting profit areas

You already know that keeping track of your performance is the best way to improve your marketing efforts, but collating that data and turning it into usable information isn’t always easy. With marketing efforts across multiple channels, in the hands of multiple people, it’s not always easy to consolidate it to bring the big picture into view.

With automated marketing software comes automated reporting, making it simple to keep track of anything from the smallest transaction to your biggest sale, and get a real idea of how everything comes together. The more sophisticated your system, the deeper you can dive into that data to get a real look at how your marketing is performing.

Once you have that data at your fingertips, your largest returns are visible so you’ll know where to invest in future. You can see at a glance how well your business is performing, and identify any problem areas.

Adjusting your efforts based on performance also becomes incredibly easy when your marketing is automated, which feeds back on itself to increase your ROI even further.

Good market research is a great investment. It provides insight into how your customers think and how they use your service, as well as what they really want. Without it, your marketing department is operating blindly and on best guesses. With it, you operate intelligently, putting your efforts to good use.

Automated marketing helps you gather important data about your customers without all the extra cost and time involved in traditional research methods. Automated marketing software can be used to track how customers use your site, indicating how it can be improved. You can also track people’s buying habits to offer them more compelling deals, at the right time.

It allows you to compile all this data in one place, and act on it quickly and automatically. Not only do you get an overview of the big picture, it also allows you to manage individual customers’ needs for improved performance. Automated email marketing and targeted ads offer your customers what they want, based on data that is automatically collected. This means great conversion rates for minimum effort.

Most of the time, potential conversions are lost, not because your service isn’t good enough, but because you didn’t follow up at the right time, or with the right offer, or you simply didn’t follow up at all. Following up individual leads can be difficult, even when you only have a few big ones to handle, but automated marketing makes it easier.

Sometimes following up doesn’t have to mean speaking directly to an individual about their specific needs, it can simply be a way of keeping in touch. Other times, you’ll want to follow up on specific leads for specific reasons. In either case, handling your marketing automatically provides an easy way to stay on top of it all, making sure your customers know you haven’t forgotten them. From cart abandonment emails to sales offers to advisory newsletters, keeping in touch with potential leads makes them more likely to come back.

The same is true of previous customers. By keeping in touch, you re-ignite their interest in you, earning repeat business as a result. In a similar way, automated outreach, when handled correctly, helps to build brand loyalty and keep your customers coming back.

More Efficiency, Better Business

In short, automating your marketing efforts helps you manage your marketing more efficiently. Your marketing team will have more time, and be able to put that time to better use. You’ll be able to wisely invest your money for better returns.

Marketing automation won’t solve all your problems, but it certainly solves a lot of them, so you’ll have more time to fix the rest. It’s simple: with automated marketing, your business will have fewer problems, operate more efficiently, and perform better.

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STEPHEN KINSELLA Operations Director

Stephen has over a decade’s digital marketing experience and 475+ client projects under his belt specialising in SEO, content marketing and local search marketing.